This invention relates to the art of bag closures and, more particularly, to a closure for the folded open end of a paper or plastic bag.
It is of course well known to close the open end of a bag of paper or plastic material by folding the open end to form a flap and then clamping the flap against the side of the bag, such as by use of a spring clip or a resilient U-shaped clip such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,086,264 to Tindall. Such closures are generally used in conjunction with storing the contents of a bag following the opening thereof and serve to preclude the spillage of the bag contents and to reduce the exposure of the contents to air, moisture, dirt and other contaminants during such periods of storage.
While resilient plastic or spring clips of the foregoing character serve their intended purpose with respect to closing the open end of a bag, they are large and undesirably expensive and undesirably space consuming with respect to storage in numbers. Furthermore, the size and cost of such clips precludes their being offered as a closure component accompanying the bag and its contents at the time of sale whereby, if a person does not have such a clip available, he or she is left with alternatives such as storing the contents of the bag in another storage container following opening of the bag, or merely folding the open end of the bag a number of times and pressing the seams of the folds in an effort to retain the latter in a closed disposition. Often, especially with resilient plastic bags, such folding is immediately followed by unfolding due to the resiliency of the bag material.